I'm PenPen! Sorry that it took a while before I properly introduced myself. I just jumped into the card design contest while it was going on and well...somehow only got to write this now. My bad.

A little bit about myself, I currently live in Hong Kong and is now fully employed as a salesperson. I am actually born in HK, but spent some years studying in the US for high school and university. I got a degree majoring in geography, which I think nobody would expect for some guy coming over from Asia to study abroad (also a great trivia question for people to guess)!

I was an avid video gamer (still plays video games), but as I'm getting up in the ages I slowly shifted my entertainment focus from the vidya to the board. I blame Sanguosha and Settlers of Catan (even though I never seriously dabbled in the latter) for starting my interest in board games. I moved through a few more board games before settling on Dominion. Not counting Monopoly from years ago, Power Grid was the first one I got after rediscovering board games, then Pandemic and its expansion, and eventually caught on Dominion. This all happened in almost 2 years ago.

Before this, during my high school days I had a not-tourney-serious interest in Magic: TG, and I had a real obsession to the awesome card Lord of the Pit, which I mostly built totally stupid decks around that card just to see it devour my other creatures (Sadistic Glee came along and it probably made the deck slightly more legit). That was fun.

To tie this above paragraph with Dominion, I originally found both similar in its execution, but Dominion doesn't burn my money as quick as M:TG, and I bought the base set as a result. Obviously the jury is still out on which is burning my money faster because I now also have Intrigue and Seaside, but I still think Dominion is still a better investment by far!

This is not a particularly proud moment but I currently do have a copy of a bootleg Chinese base set of Dominion, which someone bought for me (that makes 2 base sets, but in different languages). I think the only thing I like over the current box is that it uses a magnetic flap thing to hold the box. If you guys are interested I can show some pictures of that, I suppose (if not violating any forum rules)!

In the video games side I prefer playing strategy games (especially building sims) and fighting games (and some modern arcade games). I loved SimCity 2000 and its sequels, dabbled in Cities in Motion quite a bit, and enjoyed Civ 4. If you count the footy management sim Championship Manager and Football Manager, I'm also a great fan of it, managing teams well over 10 seasons at times. But my main interest is still in fighting games - particularly the King of Fighters series, which was pretty big in Asia and especially Hong Kong (not as much now). I couldn't get into Street Fighter however. I also to some degree played BlazBlue and Persona 4 Arena.

Currently I'm playing Guild Wars 2 as the first MMO I've played in a while. The last one was Ragnarok Online when it was out in the US. And the one before that was Ultima Online. It makes me feel old mentioning that. Maybe I should stop.

So anyway, hopefully I am able to contribute a bit more to this forum and continue to learn about strategies and bettering my Dominion-fu!

I think my UO experience started with second age and ended with Renaissance, because there was this alternate world thing that I remembered. I don't remember much, aside from running around a lot, and dead players saying stuff like OOooOOoOo as ghosts.